A bad blogger's redemption

Forgive me, blog master, for I have sinned.  I started my blog about my SF project with great enthusiasm and made great progress.  Then life caught up, and now it's a battle to find the time to work on the last 1/3 of my book.

But I am giving a reading of material from The Cord at the new Red Cedar Books in Waterloo on Feb. 21.  You're invited: http://www.facebook.com/events/487106258015884/487115688014941/?notif_t=plan_mall_activity

The Oddness of the New Yorker’s Science Fiction Issue

First, an update on my book.  I’m about 220 pages into what I think will be a 300-page draft.  It’s coming along well but taking turns I hadn’t expected.  All of a sudden robots are important (robots?  I wasn’t planning to write about robots), and they are making me have to rethink some earlier sections.  I can’t quite say that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but at least I’m pretty sure I’m in a tunnel and not a cave.  I’ve had to take a break from the book for awhile as I get ready to direct Camp Multimedia, but I’ll be back on it in hopes of having a draft done by mid-July—no, end of July—no, the end of the summer.  Well, we’ll see.

The issue of the New Yorker currently on newsstands is their first Science Fiction issue.  On a piece-by-piece basis, there are some good reads to be found.  I really liked the Sam Lipsyte and Junot Díaz stories as well as the remembrance by the recently deceased Ray Bradbury.  I wanted to really like the Jennifer Egan story, since it was a quasi-continuation of A Visit from the Goon Squad.  I even read the whole story on Twitter in the spirit of the thing (the entire story is told in tweet-sized paragraphs).  But the story, a sci fi spy tale, was just okay, and the Twitter part of it seemed unessential.  It read more like Lorrie Moore meets Roger Moore.

But, that said, what is odd about this New Yorker issue is the way the editors chose to put it together.  It comes in two discreet sections that clearly demarcate the literary writers from the SF writers. This enforced separation is really unfortunate and it kept the issue from being more interesting.

The first part consists of science fiction stories and essays by writers with a literary reputation (in addition to those mentioned above, there’s Jonathan Letham, Colson Whitehead, and Anthony Burgess). Again, there was some good reading here, but is it really that big a deal to show that writers of literary fiction can do SF-influenced work?  That’s not news for anyone who has read Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace.  Or Marge Piercy or Haruki Murakami. Or George Orwell or Mark Twain.  Can I stop now?

The other part of the issue involves short remembrances by SF-identified writers like Ursula Lu Guin, William Gibson, and Margaret Atwood (though I think of her as more literary) of their early encounters with science fiction.  The majority of these pieces strike a similar tone, combining a sense of SF as an illicit form of literature with the pure pleasure taken in reading it.  In the aggregate, these pieces reminded me of Philip Roth writing about masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint. 

If the New Yorker ever does a SF issue again, they should do it the way they do their “Best Writers Under 40” issues.  Introduce readers to a whole bunch of authors they probably don’t already know but may really like.  Plenty of New Yorker readers would be interested in Elizabeth Bear’s stories on technology and female sexuality.  They’d be intrigued, if sometimes puzzled, by Cory Doctorow’s futuristic versions of social networking.  And since the New Yorker throws a lot more money at authors than change-per-word SF pulps, they could probably have gotten Paolo Bacigalupi to start writing for adults again.

“So, what’s your book about?”

“So, what’s your book about?”

That’s a reasonable question, and it’s one I haven’t done a very good job answering to date.  But at a party when someone asks me what I’ve been up to and I say I’m writing a novel, that’s the next question. Usually, my response is “It’s a science fiction novel about a space elevator.”  That’s true, but a little deceptive.  After all, if you asked Toni Morrison what Beloved was about, she could say “Kentucky and Ohio,” which is also true but kind of misses the point.

I’m not writing a science-fiction-as-engineering-thought-experiment novel, so my book doesn’t focus on how you build the machine that lifts people from Earth into orbit without rockets (as interesting as that may be).  It wasn’t that I was trying to be misleading in my response, but since I’m only about halfway through my first draft, I didn’t really know what my book was about.  Like many people, I write via intuition with a sense that a book will emerge at the end of the process.  And, since I’m learning as I write, I’m slowly figuring out what in fact my novel is about.

So, I think I’m ready to take a stab at this.

It was helpful to read an interview with SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson that had been forwarded to me by Jason Bradford.  In that interview, Robinson has a great quote:

It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.

This excerpt really spoke to me because my novel takes place across a range of generations, moving backward in time.  The first section is set in a future “present,” then the second section takes place among the grandparents of the first section’s characters.  The third section involves the grandparents of the second section’s characters, which gets us pretty close to the present.  As a result, I’m regularly writing about characters who have only the vaguest sense of the future they will make possible, but they are nonetheless looking to shape it.  The characters across all three sections (at least the good ones) strive to build the world they themselves will never inhabit.  I have found this process very inspiring.

If it’s possible to write an anti-dystopian novel that’s not a utopia, that’s what I’m trying to do. 

But, let’s get back to the main point.  I need a good line at a party.  How about this (with apologies to Kim Stanley Robinson): “I’m writing a book about a space elevator.  It’s about how what we do now affects people two or four generations after us.” 

Now, bring on the hors d'oeuvres.

Apocalypse Not Now; or, why the end of the world is a cliché

I admit to having a low tolerance for post-apocalyptic science fiction.  I just finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which was excellent but as much as I could take.  When I read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, I was in a bad mood the whole rest of the summer, so I tend to stay away from books I should otherwise probably read, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, if it means having to plunge myself into a world in decline or collapse.

Of course, I recognize that this is just a personal preference, but it seems an appropriate abuse of a blog to turn a personal preference into a virtue.  So, I’d like to make the case against the end of the world as a cliché that does more harm than good, both for fiction and for ourselves.  But first, let’s give the cliché its due. 

I remember how revelatory it was to read early William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and to see how cyberpunk broke with much of the science fiction that preceded it.  The cyberpunks refused to allow technology to solve social problems.  New technologies only created different arenas where social conflict played out.  This brought a whole new political sensibility to science fiction, and it made some of the stodgy hard SF that came before it seem not only dated but reactionary.

As a cyberpunk sensibility came to prominence within SF, narratives about courageous scientists solving the world’s problems with inventions were replaced by dystopian visions of hackers trying to outwit multinational corporations that facilitated environmental devastation.  As a corrective, this cyberpunk sensibility was, and still can be, important.  However, as a dominant narrative trope, it has its limitations.  What started out as a progressive critique can easily morph into a kind of fatalism.  If you’ve read one too many books with cynical, well-armed protagonists, you know what I mean.   If I want to see angry, white men trying to figure out what to do based on nostalgia for a lost world, I’ll just watch Fox News.

One of the most intriguing (though also infuriating) post-cyberpunk books I’ve read is Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.  What makes it post-cyberpunk is its refusal of the clichés of apocalypse.  Doctorow’s novel envisions a post-scarcity world where many of the problems that obsess us now have been solved.  However, unlike pre-cyberpunk SF, those solutions aren’t the point of the book.  The book investigates what happens next.  How do people live in a kind of utopia where social interactions remain important?  The first half of the book lays out an amazing world that is so refreshingly free from cyberpunk concerns that I was able to realize how oppressive that worldview had become.  The second half of the book is inexplicably concerned with how rides work in the future-Disneyworld and a real let down, but that’s another issue altogether.

Of course, I would like to take the best of both worlds and write about a plausible future that doesn’t deny challenges yet doesn’t give into them either.  In fact, the apocalyptic mindset of the villains of the novel I’m writing has made their characterizations one of the easier tasks I’ve taken on.

Things are going well with my novel.  I’m 125 pages in and about to head into the crucial section of the book.  I’m actually going to step back from writing for a week to think about it more (and to catch up on a cascading to-do list I’ve been neglecting).  In other writing news, I hope to see Cedar Fallsians at the Final Thursday Reading Series tonight for a reading in honor of the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Nancy Price’s Sleeping with the Enemy.  I’ll be premiering a new flash fiction monologue.  I also have a humor piece coming out soon in McSweeney’s, one of my favorite ezines.  I’ll shamelessly plug it when it gets published.

The Language Problem in Science Fiction

            Part of the problem is familiar to any viewer of the original Star Trek.  You’re sitting there watching an episode and suddenly you think, “Hey, why do these aliens speak English with vaguely Eastern European accents?”  In the original Star Trek, this was just one of those things you weren’t supposed to question, like the physics of Warp drive and William Shatner’s hair.  By the time The Next Generation came around, something called the UniversalTranslator had been invented as a work around.  One of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books explained it by having tiny fish in people’s ears doing the translating. 

            I’m sympathetic to the problem.  It really slows the pace of your dialogue if you have to wait for a translation, so it’s much easier if you can just pretend that intergalactic language barriers just wouldn’t exist. 

            Of course, it’s all a lie. 

            It’s hard enough to talk to someone one generation removed from you about the latest feature on your phone, even if you otherwise share the same language and culture.  It’s ridiculous to think that communication is going to be easy in any future-globablized world, never mind in any intergalactic context.

Furthermore, the most interesting aspects of language are often those most subject to change.  We all speak language that reflects the slang of the moment and the shorthand we use to get things done.  GGN and GR8 aren’t much different than 23 skidoo and the bee’s knees, but neither would mean much to characters in a Jane Austen novel. But too often sci-fi ignores the problem of language so that it’s easier to write narratives that stretch over hundreds or even thousands of years.

            Many contemporary SF writers go in the other direction, immersing readers in the techo-jargon of a given moment, in hopes that we will pick it up as we go along.  Sometimes this works well.  I’m reading PauloBacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and having no problem picking up the genetic engineering lingo.  But I found the short story, “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe in Rewired:the Post-Cyberpunk Anthology to be impenetrable.  The anthology editors described it as “crammed.”  I can think of more descriptive adjectives.

            In the novel I’m working on, I need to find ways to present various forms of speech over more than a century.  The challenge is navigating between the Scylla of plausibility and the Charybdis of understandability.  I’ve gotten around this in one section by having Business English mandated as the only acceptable means of public discourse.  In another section, I’ve abused Google Translate to have conversational English peppered with a range of terms from other languages.  For the last section I need to write, I need to figure out how to make funny jokes about future settings.  That may be the biggest challenge, but it’s also the litmus test.  You know you know a language when you can make jokes in it.